I think you and I have different recollections of that deck.
As I remember, there was only one way to beat it: win fast. If it completed the quest, almost everyone else was dead because there was no way to stabilize against 5/5 one or less mana charge minions and various overpowered battlecries, etc.
There was very little way to disrupt the game plan of the deck (uninteractive), and I looked at contemporaneous accounts of the list to see if I was misremembering.
While not unreasonably powerful in the grander scheme of competitive decks, itâs often frustrating to lose against and provides little opportunity for meaningful interaction between the two players.
If Hearthstone doesnât to be a coin flip simulator, then cards that rely on RNG and luck need to get the boot. There wasnât any planning or real skill involved in Rogueâs Quest, and such a low skill deck should never be at the top of any tier list. Iâm assuming this is the reason Blizzard chose to nerf it as well. The Quest has a neat concept behind it, but Iâm not going to be upset if I donât see it at high ranks anymore.
I went to look at old VS Data from back when those articles were written. The deck wasnât even popular, with just 7% representation in DR#50. It wasnât terribly overpowered either. Contrary to the idiotic articles you linked, Crystal Rogue was a high skill rating deck similar in stat pattern to Garrote Rogue, doing considerably better in Legend (high Tier 2) than at lower ranks (Tier 3).
Even the very first nerf to the Quest shouldnât have happened, and the fact that it was nerfed twice was a crime.
Iâm getting very tired of decks like Garrote Rogue being nerfed. I think we should have decks that are Tier 1 in top Legend and Tier 3 in Diamond because theyâre difficult to pilot. Unfortunately, a lot of the public perception of decks is through streamers, and this can make the primary perception of such a deck Tier 1 and put a big target on it for nerfs.
Correct. Like ALL quests (and most combo decks), once youâve completed the quest or assembled the pieces, you become much more powerful. The downside is that prior to that point, you are much more vulnerable. In the case of QR, the much more powerful was a bit too powerful and the much more vulnerable was too vulnerable.
But if the 5/5s were instead 4/4s (or even 4/3s), maybe some decks could manage to stabilize. So instead of QR winning 85% of itâs matches against control decks, it would win 70-75% of them. Still a big favorite, but maybe more in line with what you might expect from a combo vs control matchup. Similarly, itâs weakness to aggro should have been addressed to help buff it in the early game. It would still be unfavored, but maybe not in the 15-20% unfavored range. A little nerf on the back end and a little buff on the front end could have fixed the deck. Instead they did nothing on the back end and nerfed it on the front end. That makes no sense if you actually wanted balance. And if you simply wanted the deck eliminated from play (which is what happened), just HoF the card.
But that was never offered as a reason for the nerf. In fact, I canât recall a Dev ever saying that a deck being âuninteractiveâ was a reason for a nerf.
Those are just a couple of jackasses like us spouting opinions. I donât see anything there that I didnât see in the forums at the time. But Iâll just toss in one quote from one of them:
As I said, this is arguably one of the least warranted nerfs in the history of Hearthstoneâs nerfs.
What was it waaaaay back in 2017 right? That would be roughly a year or so after they started trying to get the report fully off the ground, iirc.
So what, about 3k contributors playing maybe 60k games and they think they have a good handle on the meta? Less than that? And then they go and squash what little data they have by averaging things, so ya, gigo.
But again, youâre the smart one so I will just listen off air to your wisdom as you tell us all why we donât know as much as you about everything.
Crystal rogue was easy wins if you got your cards and not very good if you didnât. Maybe some players thought that was hard, I did not.
Oh, I agree. But we are knowing that we have a difference of opinion and no one is trying to prove their opinion right.
Maybe it was the least warranted, but I wasnât complaining. That deck was terrible experience.
They use a different word, though âinevitabilityâ when a deck canât be disrupted properly.
While we love when the community comes up with novel decks that challenge your idea of what is possible within Hearthstone, the feelings of inevitability present in Turtle Mage didnât make for a healthy gameplay experience.
My emphasis, again. That deck once it froze you you just sat there. They stopped that.
I see your point here, and I hope they considered similar, but I wonder if it would have been much more difficult to code this change. /shrug.
My first thought reading this was to wonder if that was more a deck choice for players than any design problem. By trying to complete the quest asap, you knew you were weak. Were there minions that might have helped change that they did not get included in the name of finishing the quest? I never pulled the card to mess with it and I wasnât going to craft something like that.
It still saw some play, but players chasing wins left it behind.
I donât recall âTurtle Mageâ, but I did think the constant board freezes form Exodia Mage were incredibly annoying. Iâd often get to the point where I literally could not play a card - board locked and frozen and not even a playable spell in my hand. And while Ice Block did eventually get HoFâd, that deck was allowed to persist through the expansion.
But Iâll have to keep an eye out for that term âinevitabilityâ in future dev comments. I mean Mecha-thun Warlock had âinevitabilityâ, but I donât recall the uproar over that deck. But that card is the epitome of âinevitableâ. I loved that deck, too⌠and with practice, you could win with it. And so delicious when you hit it with 1 health remaining. People also need to remember that just because youâre unable to interact with me doesnât mean Iâm not interacting with you. Mecha-thun Lock had plenty of board clears and big removals and healing and stuff along the way to the combo setup.
Too difficult for what? Too difficult for one of the largest, most profitable gaming companies in the world? I think youâd agree that âtoo difficultâ would be an entirely unacceptable excuse.
I tried that approach, but there just wasnât much healing or defense available to Rogues. It just wasnât enough to hold up to aggro. The extra turn or two until quest completion gave more opportunity to the opponent than the healing or defense could make up for. One idea I had was to change the Brewmaster to give armor when bouncing a minion, but then your asking one card to do too many things; plus, since Brewmaster was a neutral it might throw it out of balance unless you nerfed the stats too.
Very, very little play. Iâm a casual player who loved it, and even I dropped the deck. The point is they either wanted to balance it and failed miserably OR they wanted it gone from play and that whole dev comment was a load of crap.
Ugh⌠youâre getting all agitated about this again Selwynn. Now Iâm gonna go kick some puppies.
As I said, I donât know the process that would be required to make the different changes to the quest. I was simply wondering aloud if they opted for a faster, cheaper option.
Theyâre a business, after all. Their resources are actually finite despite what many commentators here believe, lol.
It was the tortollan pilgrim mage deck that would freeze your board then copy itâs own stuff with potion, then freeze, then copy and it could do it until lethal. If you did not have damage from hand you couldnât beat it once the pilgrims started going off because you couldnât play minions or attack.
Not sure I can accept this either. Billions in revenue. Find the resources. Changing the stats is easy. They actually did that in the second nerf. The hard part would have been how to make it just a little more resilient to aggro.
Which was kill the deck. And I hate them for it. But Iâd have felt better if they simply told the truth.
Iâm surprised I never came across that. But it sounds like an odd interaction that wasnât foreseen. QR wasnât like that. They knew exactly what it was and how it would work.
With the mages, yes, I think the creativity of the playerbase shocked them. They actually commented on the deck being watched and only when it left meme playrate did it get nerfed.
We had talked about Pilgrim in balance meetings previously, but wanted to see how the deck would compete with time. Was it just an interesting tournament pick or would it become a mainstay on the ladder with a solid winrate? Over time it became clear that Turtle Mage was here to stay. There was a clear shift in âmaybe it falls offâ to âI see this on the ladder quite frequently.â
So I wonder if the degree that quest rogue would get refined was not forseen. I feel like this is a common issue with blizzard, tbh.
It seems to me that QR was pretty effective right out of the gate. And itâs not like people came up with something weird. It pretty much ran exactly as intended â small minions, bounced multiple times and then all buffed up to 5/5s. What may have been unexpected was the extreme spread in the win rates against control and against aggro.
Back stab or no, Tar Creepers, Patches, Bilefin Tidehunters, Swashburglers, etc. There were many lists and iterations of the deck. There were even doomsayer versions.
I donât think they expected the quest to be done in five turns, actually. They playerbase squeezed and made that happen.
The new Quest Hunter decks look more like a control deck now because of the cards they lost. Simply just trying to race the face wonât work any long with all the strong aggro and Tempo decks that exist.